The Prestige

Every great magic trick consists of three acts. The first act is called "The Pledge." The magician shows you something ordinary...but, of course, it probably isn't.

That's the first part of the short speech that's being used to sell the film The Prestige to viewing audiences. The words are, as the speech says, something ordinary...but, of course, they aren't. They aren't because they're spoken by Michael Caine, in his iconic, slightly hoarse voice of suspense and mystery. This man doesn't so much have a secret as knows there's one here, and his greatest thrill in life is to show it to you. He's not the magician. That's not his job. You don't see him. You hear him.

It's very difficult to review this film properly without offering spoilers, but I'm going to give it a go - there is no story information in this review that isn't available from the movie's preview trailer. Have you ever settled into a movie theater seat after an interminable series of previews and (nowadays) ads, popcorn at the ready (or, if you're like me, half gone) and had that feeling of "can we please get on with this?" If so, then at this point, you'll feel right at home when this film starts. If you've watched the preview, this film's Pledge will offer you exactly what a pledge should - something ordinary. It's a film about two men (Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman), stage magicians, whose lives are intertwined, and the first act will show you how they got that way. It's got enough interesting elements in it to lift it beyond a linear action movie. This isChristopher Nolan, after all; you didn't think the man who gave you Memento was going to tell you a straight story, did you? Other than that, though, it's a very workmanlike period piece, well-filmed with enough of a 'back lot' air to it to keep it from being an 'extravaganza' and noteworthy for its art.

The second act is called "The Turn." The magician makes this ordinary something do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret, but you won't find it.

The second act continues the formula. Something ordinary does become something...slightly extraordinary. This is presaged by the preview, which can't help but give away some of what makes this story extraordinary. You will start looking for the secret - but which one? There are several here, it becomes clear; there's the secret in in the movie, and (if you're at all sapient) you'll begin to realize there's a secret to the movie, as well. And thus, you'll start looking for one or more of them. Will you find it? The speech says you won't. I can't tell you if that's true. Certainly it's unlikely you'll find any of them at the start of the second act, because there simply isn't enough information to even know where they're going; but I will say that there's enough information leaking around to give away some of what Nolan's doing. Remember, these are magicians. Even moviemakers are magicians, of a sort, as are scriptwriters, and whether the Nolans are as good at their craft as their characters are at theirs - well, that's for you to judge.

That's why there's a third act, called "The Prestige." This is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking that you've never seen before.

-Cutter

The third act is where The Prestige starts to show signs of danger. If the movie is a clockwork mechanism, a steampunk Victorian orrery on a seven per cent solution amped up with the dark energy of one of Tesla's oscillators and spinning too fast, this is where you would sense rather than hear a dangerous vibration in the floorboards. It might make you think of stepping back a pace - because when something this complex and fast-moving starts shuddering like that, no matter how lightly, all you can think about is the speed at which the pieces will be moving if it goes unbalanced and flies apart.

Does it unbalance? I can't tell you with any assurance. I personally don't think it did, completely. This is a subjective judgement; you can't of course see bits of plot and believability come juddering off the screen. But to stretch a bad metaphor further, if it didn't come apart, the last few minutes certainly saw it (to me) get unbalanced enough to rob it of the manic speed with which it had been propelling me along and keeping me from looking to closely at the Man Behind The Curtain, or the Prop Rubber Saw, or whatever the Mcguffin is that I'm not supposed to see. I did figure out a few of the secrets. Not all of them. But enough to rob the ending of what may have been the WHOOMP that is required to make this an untrammeled WHEEEEEE of a ride. I have a suspicion that one of the Nolans and I have read the same classic scifi short story.

Having said that, I don't think this is because the cast failed in their tasks. I don't even think it's because the Nolans did, either, unless it was at attempting a bit too complex a piece of magic with not quite enough rehearsals of the showmanship that decorates it. I was happy with the $9.00 I paid to see it in the theater, especially since it was a gripping 2:15 - and few enough movies are that long for the price and fewer still are entertaining for the whole time.

Technically, the film is very well done. It's filmed in very dark environments, by choice; it's almost period lit (1890-1900 or so) with lamplight and early electric, in basement halls and primitive theaters. While the lighting isn't nearly as luscious as, say, Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, that's sort of like saying the new midrange Mercedes sedan isn't quite a Ferrari. The former is a well-engineered vehicle whose job is to not get in your way when performing its primary task, which is that of being a car. The latter...well, the latter's job is to be, in your face, a car to such ludicrous extremes you can drip the experience from your lips while grinning in unalloyed hedonism. The soundtrack was perfectly adequate, creating the required moods without telegraphing too much - I am complimenting it when I say I didn't notice it. There were no 'tie in songs' to distract me. The theater I was in had a crappy sound system, unfortunately, so I can't comment on the surround mix; I suspect that given the environments some of the scenes take place in, there were some excellent opportunities for surround sound magic.

Perhaps the best question to ask yourself after you've seen it is one that is asked during the movie several times, and your answer may have bearing on whether you enjoyed it.

The Prestige (2006 film)

I've read a lot of reviews of this movie, most of them good. But the few reviewers who disliked it invariably had two complaints: that the movie's narrative structure was too confusing and complicated to follow, or that the plot was too "gimmicky" and not original enough.

The first complaint can be quickly dispatched with. Certainly director Christopher Nolan is no stranger to intricately layered narrative structures built on overlapping scenes from different times and places that have to be reordered and reconstructed in the viewers mind. But any difficulty in following this movie's plot pales in comparison to the difficulty of many other, much more challengingly narrated films, such as Nolan's own Memento. Especially given that the very first words uttered in The Prestige enjoin the viewer to make sure they are "watching closely", and that every new scene very quickly employs some device to indicate which part of the story's timeline it is taking place in, one would have to be very slow-witted indeed to be overly confused. All of which goes to indicate that about twenty percent of American movie reviewers are rather slow-witted.

The second complaint has a bit more merit. The Prestige is certainly a film that relies on plot twists, and since there are only about 27 plot twists in the history of humankind, it is pretty hard to come up with a twist that nobody has ever seen before in some form or another in some other film or book. This film certainly does not. Moreover, the plot twists are deliberately undermined, in that the Nolan brothers have purposely chosen to reveal to the audience enough information to allow someone who actually does "watch closely" to theoretically be able to figure out what all the twists will be before they are revealed.

To me it was precisely this choice that elevated The Prestige beyond the ordinary to the level of an extraordinary film. Because what the Nolan brothers have created is a film that becomes an extended meditation on itself. The parallels between what the characters are doing and saying they are doing in the movie, and how the movie itself is constructed, are amazing, and brilliant, and will have you thinking for days afterwards.

Just to give one example, at one point in the movie Michael Caine's character explains to Hugh Jackman's character that Scarlett Johansson's character is just on stage to distract the audience. By the end of the film, it becomes clear that Scarlett Johansson herself was just in the film to distract the real audience in the same way.

At their core, all magic tricks are about misdirection. By giving the viewers everything they need to figure out what is going on, the Nolan brother's have made a movie that will likewise have to depend on misdirection to succeed, just like the stage magicians whose lives it chronicles. This requires flawless execution, and that is what the Nolan brothers have achieved. The plot is airtight, without a wasted scene in the whole film, the direction is inspired, and every member of the star-studded cast nails their part to perfection. It is easy to imagine that this same exact plot, with a lesser director and/or a less able cast, could have been a complete piece of crap, just like the same exact magic trick can completely flop if performed by a magician with less flair and skill, as the film shows us. Magic tricks are about turning the ordinary into the extraordinary, and that is what this film has done.

Although like The Custodian, I too was able to figure out some aspects of what was really going on, but personally, I was grateful that the Nolans allowed me the chance to play this game of wits with them, unlike a superficially similar but philosophically different movie I saw earlier this year - The Illusionist - in which it was completely impossible to see exactly which of the 27 plot twists was coming because the audience was deliberately denied access to crucial information.

Even if a magic trick is perfectly executed, it should theoretically be possible for a very canny observer who watched closely to be able to figure out what was done. The best magic tricks always walk this fine line: they have to show you enough - almost too much - to give you the feeling that just maybe you know, or think you should know, how it was done. The only real difference between The Prestige and a real-life magic trick is that at the end of a movie, the director is required to let the audience know how the trick was done, whereas a stage magician just walks away and leaves you never quite sure how he did it, but knowing only that you saw something extraordinary.

Are you watching closely? I think you should be, because really that's the whole fun of it.